Sunday, January 11, 2015

Criminality and Jihad in France

France has a large underclass of underemployed people, many of them trapped in a grim world of welfare and crime in concrete housing blocks. The difference from the US is that the French underclass is mainly made up of immigrants' children whose parents or grandparents came to France from Africa, and they are mainly Muslim. The existence of this class of people, who can be found all across Europe, will make it hard to ever eradicate Islamist extremism on the continent, since it offers hope, meaning, purpose, and guns to alienated, angry young men:
Before he stormed into Hyper Cacher, a Jewish supermarket at Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris, Amedy Coulibaly was already well known to French police for his six convictions — five for robbery and one for drugs.
Once he joined the radicals Coulibaly's life was outwardly transformed; he lived "quietly" with his wife and got a job at a bottling plant, where he was such a "model employee" that he was invited to meet the French president with a large group of reformed criminals. But he was already bent on destroying the society that had turned him into a criminal outcast.

This sort of story also offers another reason why Europe must turn away from austerity and toward job creation. Unemployment among young Muslim men is very high all across the continent, more than 25% in France, and all those men who can't get jobs make a fertile field for jihadist recruiting.

3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

The sad thing is, plenty of Europeans seem to think that if young Muslim men can't get jobs locally, they'll just leave somehow and go somewhere else - or perhaps magically wink out of existence.

You can see essentially the same attitudes and thinking here in America - plenty of people deeply resent 2nd and 3rd generation Latin Americans for "stealing" jobs, financial aid, et cetera, despite the fact that they are full US citizens guilty only of being born to immigrant parents, and having to cope with a lack of legal, social, and financial privileges that their detractors take for granted.

Xenophobia is not just demonstrably irrational - it's also demonstrably self destructive. Both actively mistreating minorities and passively turning a blind eye to social iniquity and inequity in one's nation only breeds calamity and suffering. Immigration simply cannot be "undone". People have to learn to accept this reality and stop trying to put the proverbial genie back into the bottle.

szopen said...

Of course immigration can be undone. My home country was once a home for large minorities. Today is one of the most hmogenous countries in the world. Another example is Yugoslavia, where large immigrations were also undone. Every time it required massive amounts of human sufferings and deaths. Another reason why mass immigration is bad, because it MAY lead to social unrest, thousands of deaths in the future.

szopen said...

One more thing, xenophobia is no more irrational than tolerance. There is no rationality in morality.